Why hasn't the right-wing populist wave taken off in BC?
 

BC used to be the "populist" capital of Canada, with leaders such as Vander Zalm and WAC Bennett (and on the left you had Dave Barrett). The groovy West Coast province also enthusiastically embraced the Reform Party in the 90s.

Fast forward to today "boring" Ontario has Doug Ford as Premier, Quebec is swinging heavily toward the CAQ and even Rachel Notley in Alberta seems to sounding like an "Eastern bastards freeze in the dark" Albertan in order to stave off the united right under Jason Kenney.

Meanwhile BC today has "dull and competent" John Horgan as premier, and two patricians leading the Liberal and Green parties. The BC Conservative Party went nowhere.

Andrew Wilkinson's main concern seems to be the "plight" of the $3 million homeowner. There were no right-wing populist challengers in the BC Liberal leadership race.

Why is this? Real estate boom making people feel less disaffected? West Coast culture in general? The name "Liberal" scaring away the hard-right from the BC Liberal Party?

I don’t know why, but I’ve heard that west coast (including Seattle, The Bay Area, etc) is generally more liberal (compared to the east coast, i.e. Boston).

Largely it has to do with John Horgan actually dealing with the external threat. There was a lot of anger prior to Horgan's election under Christie's government about the external threat. If Horgan is successful, there is a chance that he can stem the populist wave in BC. If he fails. . .

Both are liberal, But yes I agree Seattle and Bay Area are to the more extreme left. Boston has always been a Kennedy type town, a more relaxed liberal. Boston and new england area there are a lot of rules and police seem more of a military influence. West coast is what you see on the news these days which i wont get into. Seattle is one of my favorite cities when it came to the Nirvana/Pearl Jam days but how the city is ran really turns me off.

It's there, it's just horribly diluted by a split in votes on the right coupled with high immigration and an influx of Alberta's best and brightest... Thank Goodness...

What "vote-splitting" on the right are you referring to? The BC Conservative Party is only slightly more formidable than the Trillium Party of Ontario.

Even though immigrants are mostly "conservative" when it comes to certain social ideas (i.e. regarding gays etc...) they are also wary of voting for a party that sees them as the "other." At least that's how I've always seen it. Nearly 60% of the population in GVR is Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Iranian, Indian, Pakistani etc.. etc... If not first generation, they're second or third generation. I was a kid when we moved to Canada and I would never vote for a BC conservative, no matter what.

The Liberal Party in BC is very pro business and there's no reason to look elsewhere anyway.

Ontario also has lots of immigrants and that hasn't stopped Ford from being elected Premier.

This is my answer as well. Horgan actually came out with a rational plan to deal with it. I agree that if it messes up, we might see a different candidate come out next time around.

And because we only have 2 big parties, one of which already had a leader and mostly serves those that like our housing prices anyway, the NDP was unlikely to produce a crazy right-wing populist. Not sure that left-wing populism would be an effective response to the current issue anyway.

I was actually thinking about that as I was writing my post, but didn't have a good counter so I didn't talk about it. I honestly don't know how to reconcile this with a bullet proof argument, but the one thing I can think of is the cultural difference between white Europeans in the West and in the East. White European descendants on the West coast (and I'm including the Pararies in the mix) are a lot less "cosmopolitan" than the ones in the East. Maybe immigrants are more comfortable with voting in a party that represents the core values of European descent people in Ontario, but not so in the West as the core values of European descent people are a lot more right wing.

I don't think BC whites are more culturally conservative than Ontario whites - if anything the opposite is probably true. There may be more "ethnic whites" in Ontario but that cuts both ways.

You're thinking about Vancouver Island white people. They are very left leaning. But if you look at white people outside of Vancouver, you essentially have Red Deer!!White people in Kelowna, Penticton etc.... are just as conservative (even more so probably) as people in Alberta. And in Vancouver itself it's not that different. White folks in North Vancouver (district) are also very Albertan.

In any case, when BC Liberals are so pro business, there's really no reason to vote for a conservative party as far as immigrants and second/third gen immigrants are concerned. Why risk it? That's how I see it at least. I'm getting the best of both worlds if I vote Liberal.

The conservative people in Kelowna are from Alberta. And North Vancouver has no similarity with Alberta whatsoever. Are you from out of town?

One question is why do these right-wing "Albertans" in the interior keep deferring to a Van elite leadership? There is nothing "populist" about Wilkinson whatsoever.

Well, to be fair the northern New England areas also had the left wing Bernie Sanders-supporting Vermont, New Hampshire etc.

White European descendants are also a lot fewer generations removed from the "old country" though out west. British Columbia has tons of people who are only two or three generations removed from the British Isles. Not sure if that makes them any more or less "cosmopolitan" than an Italian-Canadian in Northern Ontario or a Greek Torontonian.



Are there more people in interior BC that come from, or have family roots of Albertans moving west, or from west coasters moving inland?

Couldn't you argue also the reverse of more disaffected, not less -- high cost of housing relative to local income might make people more "right wing populist" and anti-globalization and anti-foreigner, and more "nativist" as people seem to suggest.

Docere, might I point out that your focus on demographics seems a bit more obsessive and obscuring more than it is illuminating. It serves to distract you so that you can talk about demographics rather than talking about politics.

I'm not of the "demographics as destiny" school at all. I was just responding to claims that 1) a large immigrant population makes right-wing populists unelectable in BC and 2) that BC whites are to the right of Ontario whites neither of which I think is true.

BC used to be the populist capital of the country but that seems to have dissipated in the last decade or so.

Where were those claims being made?

Several types of former Albertans in the interior. First there are those who bought property and retired there, and then there are seasonal property owners, many of whom plan to retire there when the time comes. Then there are the people like myself who grew up in the interior and left for Alberta 20 years ago because there were no opportunities for young people at home, but now that we’ve done well and can support ourselves in a smaller town are moving back. That’s happening with a lot of my friends from high school who have become professionals, started families and like the idea of being closer to family and being in what a lot of people consider a better environment to raise a family

In my experience, the Albertans with no roots other than they own property or live there are far more conservative than those with roots in the area

I think the last real populist wave in BC was when the Social Credit was in power and even then more in the early days. I find Alberta far more monocultured than BC, and I think you’ve got too much diversity throughout the province, even in the conservative regions, for any sort of populist wave to take hold.

Pretty much nailed it.

One difference between BC and Ontario is that BC doesn't really seem to have Toronto Sun-type tabloids. Yeah, there's the Province but it's more just Vancouver Sun lite (which is a pretty conventional center-right paper).

I suspect the Interior has a lot of Alberta retirees and so on, but the working class there seems to have moved rightward. There's definitely a coast vs. interior split in BC.

Except the west kootenays we are pure ndp. Just like van island.

Is there any answer to this besides "because they're not the NDP."

^^ Yes it's easy to just say that Vancouver is liberal and the rest of the province is conservative but that's not really true. As you noted the Kootenays went NDP, so did the all the coastal ridings. Looking at the ridings in the central interior, most of the conservative MP's won their seats with less than 40% of the vote, the only one to break 50% being Peace River.

I don't really understand the question... most Albertans who move to the interior (the ones without any ties other than they moved there) tend more to defer to Albertan conservative values rather than Vancouver liberal values

I don't think the conservatism of the interior can simply be attributed to "Albertans."

And even so, how are they deferring to "conservative Albertan values" by supporting a party always led by Vancouverites?

Of course Wilkinson hasn't been tested yet, so it's hard to know how Thurston Howell III plays with the electorate.

Christy Clark had the most "populist" appeal of the three most leaders of the BC Liberals (though she seemed more driven by narcissism than any ideology) - even having to run in the Okanagan to get a seat when was Premier.

No, not totally of course. But there is definitely a conservative influence in the interior and a large part of that comes from the number of Albertans living there, and there are quite a lot of them

I assume you're talking about provincial politics.. in BC the Liberal party is essentially a PC party in many ways. the only conservative party in BC is way out on the fringes.

We'll see, I think eventually.. maybe sooner rather than later the Liberals will regain power, but so far the coalition has beat many of the skeptic's predictions. I don't really see Clark as being populist. She's the main reason the liberals lost the last election

BC Liberals are very much like the old federal PCs. The PCs don't exist in Alberta anymore (and they weren't the party of the right in the last two provincial elections there).

Populist doesn't mean "most popular." By that definition the decisively unpopulist Gordon Campbell (basically a Mulroney-style suit) was the most populist leader of all, given that he got 57% of the vote and 77 of 79 seats in 2001.

They’re trying to make a comeback. The Alberta Party is essentially the Alberta PC’s 2.0. Same old cronies, same old politics

I know. Clark wasn’t populist because she wasn’t trying to represent the wishes of the mainstream BC’er. Or at least she failed at it while trying

She did lose the "urban elite" districts of Point Grey and Fairview for the Liberals while gaining seats in the interior when she won in 2013 by presenting herself as the "hard hat" candidate. In 2017 she failed with the same strategy - but I don't know if her reduced voting coalition was that different in its composition. The main difference was suburban Lower Mainland marginals flipping to the NDP.

Busting a gut here at all the pundits that think the only people on the right side of the spectrum in BC are migrants displaced from Alberta. Funny, that.

What about the BC Bible Belt alongside that of Alberta being conservative on the basis of it being religiously conservative (whether or not it's conservative on economic grounds) and disliking the secular, nonreligious cities on the coast with culture that it would disagree with (eg. LGBT, abortion etc.), regardless of economics.

Funny how a Bible-thumper like Stockwell Day did so well in BC.

He was very subtle with that subject. I didn't even know he was into that stuff.

He wasn't subtle at all. His born-again views were central to the campaign and helped sink the Alliance from breaking through in Ontario.

He wasn't like that in BC he must have known most of us aren't into that. I think of him of that water skiing or sea too guy lol.

I still remember, back when he was running, Stockwell Day's creationism was heavily mocked by those on the left with jokes about the Flintstones and toy dinosaurs.

I remember at the time that Stockwell Day was being mocked for Creationism, that it struck me as a big contrast with the US in terms of how even among the mainstream, religious or not, Creationism was much more "fringe" in Canada.

This is true. By the time ol’ Stock was jetskiing into the beach at Westbank he was actively trying to change people’s perceptions of him. Not saying he wasn’t still a strong religious zealot but he was definitely making an effort to brand himself differently

Westbank is also a pretty affluent riding in the interior. His support may have had as much to do with that (or more) as his religious beliefs

But he didn't win just his own seat for the Alliance - they got 49% of the vote across BC!

Well that was 18 years ago in a vastly different political climate. Chretien managed to alienate the west completely by that time, and the Liberals were basically the Ontario party.

That, and Harper got rid of a lot of the "populist" elements of Reform (triple E Senate, more referenda and the like).

BC is a very divided province I find, I find our left here is more left than elsewhere while our right tends to be more economically right then elsewhere while being socially moderate to Liberal.

I grew up in Kelowna, a city many here would call conservative as hell, and you know what? it DOES vote right in every election.

But thats with low turnout and almost no one I knew there liked the BC Liberals/Federal Conservatives. In fact the latter so much there was a strong movement to elect Stephen fuhr in 2015 which was successful.

Kelowna is often thrown into the bible belt and compared with conservatives parts of the US but that wasn't my experience there at all, most people hated Harper when I lived there viewing him as destroying Canada's reputation, many were conservatives who bought the Canadian progressive narrative and reputation, they merely only wanted lower taxes.

BC is the most secular province in Canada with the lowest level of christian residents and highest level of non religious people, as a non religious individual in Kelowna most people under 40 I knew were also non religious, heck everyone even my grandmother didn't care about religion, and most people were certainly socially liberal.

The BC interior is conservative yes but many here are acting as if it's deep south style social conservative when it really isn't.

As for why the Canadian alliance was successful? A LOT of protest votes against the Liberals and provincial NDP at the time, really all it amounts to.

Kelowna also voted for the federal Liberals in 2015.